Representatives of Russian TV channels have urged international organizations, including the UN, UNESCO and the OSCE, to protect the rights and dignity of journalists covering the Ukraine crisis from illegal actions of the Kiev authorities.

Disturbed by intensified assaults and intimidation of journalists
in Ukraine, their detentions and deportations, the heads of all
Russia's major TV corporations, including RT, have called on
human rights organizations to “defend the professional rights
of journalists working in Ukraine.”

“Ukraine’s Donetsk, Lugansk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and
other regions are witnessing the ruthless suppression of civil
liberties on a daily basis. Journalists are being threatened with
their lives if they continue to report from Ukraine,” the
letter reads, signed by the heads of All-Russia State Television
and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), NTV, REN TV, Channel 5,
RT and News Media.

“The new Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly taken illegal
actions barring our staff journalists covering the Ukraine crisis
from performing their professional duties and violating their
human dignity,” the letter says.

In the latest incident on Friday morning, Lifenews
journalists Julia Shustraya and Mikhail Pudovkin, were detained
and later deported to Russia. The crew was abducted by armed
Ukraine Security Service members, after they filmed an interview
with one of the leaders of the pro-federalization movement in
Ukraine.

“[Journalists] are being watched, their phone conversations
wiretapped. There were cases when journalists were forced to get
down on their knees, beaten during detention and illegally
deported from Ukraine,” the joint address to UN, OSCE and
UNESCO reads.

The plea states that as a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Council of Europe, Ukraine must follow requirements of
Declaration on Mass Communication Media and Human Rights, thereby
“public authorities must make available information on
matters of public interest and that the mass communication media
must give complete and general information on public
affairs.”

Furthermore article 9 of the Declaration prescribes that
“special measures are necessary to ensure the freedom of
foreign correspondents in order to permit the public to receive
accurate information from abroad,” including “protection from
arbitrary expulsion.”

The letter also states that Russian news crews working in Ukraine
do not violate any existing laws, and that in case they are
“barred from reporting from Ukraine, the civil rights of
people from around the world to receive information will be
violated.”

Ukraine has a bad track record on freedom of the press, with 139
violations against the press and 51 attacks registered by the
Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ), last year, including the
period of protests on Maidan. But attacks on the press has
intensified after the February coup.

“Journalists should not be treated as pawns during this
crisis and should be allowed to report freely,” CPJ Europe
and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said,
following the deportation of Lifenews staff. “We call on all
sides to stop treating those who try to report on the crisis as
enemies,” she added, calling for the release of Sergey
Lefter, a reporter for the Warsaw-based Open Dialogue Foundation,
who went missing last week.

Just as international delegations met in Geneva last week to
negotiate a roadmap for the peaceful solution to the Ukranian
crisis, two unidentified men attacked Yevgeny Polozhy,
editor-in-chief of the independent news website Panorama, in the
northern city of Sumy. Polozhy was allegedly beaten and
hospitalized with a broken skull and other bodily injuries.

On Thursday, Ukraine’s Security Service reported that a producer
working for Russia’s NTV channel, Belorussian national Stepan
Chirich, was detained in the city of Pershotravensk in the
Dnepropetrovsk region. Chirich remains in custody, after being
accused of bringing an undeclared video camera into Ukraine. A
Ukrainian cameraman from the city of Lugansk who accompanied
Chirich also remains under arrest.

The men were detained by Ukraine's "Dnepr" unit on Wednesday when
they were filming administrative buildings on hidden cameras.
Both are being investigated under the article that forbids the
use of “special technical means of obtaining information.”

On Monday, Simon Ostrovsky, a journalist for the New York-based
Vice News, was detained by self-defense forces in Slavyansk.
After being detained for three days and questioned, Ostrovsky was
released Thursday. Alongside Ostrovsky,
Yevgeny Gapich, a journalist who was working on a story for the
Ukrainian newspaper Reporter was also released.

Last Sunday anti-government activists in eastern Ukraine’s
protester-held town of Slavyansk detained prominent pro-Maidan activist Irma Krat.
She rejected accusations that she was acting as a spy for the
Kiev authorities, saying she was in the Donetsk region in her
capacity as a journalist.

On Tuesday, reports surfaced that unknown assailants threw
Molotov cocktails at the newsroom of the local newspaper
Provintsiya in the town of Konstantinovka, in Donetsk region.

The Russian Foreign Ministry on Friday urged the OSCE to react
“to mass repressions of media workers” that come amid
the military operations launched by the Kiev regime in the
southeast of Ukraine.

Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner
for human rights, in his Twitter voiced concerned over the
crackdown on freedom of speech in Ukraine.

“Detentions of undesirable journalists by Ukrainian
authorities and radicals - violation of freedom of speech and the
media. Where is the reaction from Western "human rights"
watchdogs?” he tweeted. Accusing the West of “double
standards", Dolgov tweeted that “basic human rights are
sacrificed in the information war.”

OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Dunja Mijatović
meanwhile stated that the organization is “very
concerned” by repeated attacks on journalists, saying that
“journalists must be allowed to report freely and their
safety ensured by all those in charge.”